Search form

Video

There’s been much ado about Jack Davis lately. The political consultant with ties to big developers and mayors Gavin Newsom, Willie Brown, and Frank Jordan is beinglinked to the incredibly shady “Clean Up the Plaza” astroturf campaign, all while “working as a paid political consultant for the condo project at 16th and Mission.”

So the timing couldn’t have been better for Last Gasp, the Mission District publisher that recently released a colorful account of Jack Davis’s notorious 1997 50th birthday party. The details of which include everything that makes San Francisco the best fucked city in the United States: heavy metal satanist musicians, drinking blood and piss, politicians eating blood-soaked cake, someone getting fucked by a bottle of Jack Daniels, and pigs running amok. A prized party so brilliant and offensive, the Chronicle described it as “like the Folsom Street Fair with free booze.”

And for some bonus fun, the NY Times interviewed our disgraced gun-running state senator Leland Yee about the party, then just a lowly city supervisor who spent evenings cruising Capp Street for prostitutes and stuffing stolen suntan lotion in his underoos:

“When I walked in, everyone had their clothes on,” said a city Supervisor, Leland Y. Yee, one of many public officials who have been protesting their innocence.

Mr. Yee, a new member of the board, said he had concluded that there were indeed limits, even to the tolerance of this famously tolerant city. “Bloodletting and public urination are lines you just don’t cross,” he said.

Sure, it was hella dark when you woke up, but did the extra hour at the end of the day improve your mood at least? No? Maybe check out this time-lapse sunset shot by Tristan O’Tierney from the top of 555 California. Now just relax. That’s better. Everything will be okay.

When just a teenager visiting San Francisco for the first time, a highlight of the family trip was the Musée Mechanique. This was back when video arcades were still a thing, but the clunk and whir of the old-timey automatons hadn’t lost their charm and even felt fresh next to the CRT-and-joystick sameness of that era’s Atari, Midway and Nintendo cabinet games. It’s since been moved from the old location out by Ocean Beach to its current home at Fisherman’s Wharf, but like Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No.1, little of the magic has been lost to time or more modern distractions. If you haven’t been, or haven’t been in a while, hopefully this meditative short will remind you what it’s like to look through childish eyes in wonder again for just a moment.

Hamburger Eyes, the Mission’s own zine publishing house, has put out a few video zines chronicling the weird life this town has to offer. Watching all four videos will only set you back 10 minutes, and you can catch some solid shots of everything from the Bushman to the 2012 World Series celebration.

After the fledging garage rock group POW! was unfortunately (fortunately?) dragged into John Dywer's gentrification temper tantrum, we were left anxious to see what their first video would look like—and get a taste of the tunes that spurred Dywer to pound out such a visceral press release in the band's favor.

Now we have that video. While it lacks molotovs being chucked at Twitter's office and guitars smashing a Google bus piñata, it does feature plenty of CGI-polished shots of kids gambling and being in a band. Helluva tune, too.

2013 was an ugly year for the city's leftover crop of crummy bars, with dives like Jack's, Pop's, The Attic, and Nitecap either closing or poised for makeovers. But there are still plenty of solid spots left in the city to score $2 bottles and cheap bags of chips hanging from the wall, and the new video series, Dirty Old Bar, is here to celebrate those working-class stalwarts holding on.

Yesterday they released their morning look at Clooney's, interviewing everyone from the bartender, Isaac Fitzgerald, and even the bar's owner on the family history of the joint (although the owner didn't bring up how the entire bar was once moved across the Mission). Turns out Clooney's is one of the last multi-generational family bars left in the city. Who knew?

(And if you want more from Dirty Old Bar, their trip to The Brown Jug Saloon is worth a watch:)

The above video is from BuzzFeed, which means your finger is already trembling across your trackpad to close this tab. But it's actually… funny? It is! They even hired some low-rent Kevin O'Shea impersonator to star for additional local flavor. Give it a watch.

Kink.com recently let their employee's creative juice start flowing, as opposed to their other juices, by having them film a series of short films that promote their Armory tour program. It's a weird lot of non-pornographic films; shorts that mostly appeal to my adolescent sense of humor. But there are some gems in there.